by Melanie Rawn
He shrugged a reply. He could tell himself that his concern was for Mieka, or for Jindra, but at bottom it was really for himself. So that he didn’t have to live through in reality what those Elsewhens had shown him reality could be.
He considered enlisting Jinsie’s help in convincing the others that they ought to perform for the Marching Society without visual effects. Upon further consideration, though, he thought it best to broach the subject in private. Not for the first time, his partners surprised him. Rafe merely shrugged, but seemed willing. Jeska was intrigued. Mieka couldn’t wait to give it a try. They spent a fascinating afternoon discussing the adaptation of a play so as to perform it without visual effects. Sound, sensation, taste, scent, emotion—but the backdrop and physical action would all have to be conveyed with words. After their show that evening at Players Hall, Cade sat up very late writing and rewriting. He hadn’t felt this frustrated and provoked by work in a long time. It made him very happy.
They’d decided on “The Silver Mine.” Nothing much happened in it to look at anyway, just the back-and-forth from the lamplit cavern with its dully sparkling veins of ore to the torchlit hillside where the sons kept vigil. Cade had rewritten it so that there were only four characters instead of six. Jeska had to provide really distinctive voices for each. He was nervous about conveying the changes and personalities without costume or facial expression, although during the run-through he managed it so well that Jinsie, watching from the back of the converted greenhouse, leaped to her feet and began to applaud.
“I haven’t even started using any magic yet,” Mieka complained loudly. “Do you need me at all for this?”
“Probably not!” she called back, grinning as he scowled.
“No bullying the glisker!” Cade exclaimed. “Even if he is your twin brother and an annoying little git!”
Mieka stuck out his tongue at him, and flourished a withie. “May we continue? Ever so beholden to you, O Great Master Tregetour! Jeska, we follow the usual script for the first part. Cade got rid of or condensed the other speeches. I want a hand signal from you as to when exactly you want the changes, right?”
“Won’t the audience see any gestures I make?”
“Not with what I’ve got planned.” He bounced excitedly on his toes behind the new polished oaken frames that snuggled the glass baskets. “We don’t want total darkness. That would only send them looking at the sidelights over the doors. But there won’t be anything definite to look at, either. Just swirls of black on blacker, some dark grays, bits and flashes of silver.” He twirled a glass twig between his fingers, then pointed it at the masquer. “You’re used to being all alone out there, but with supporting scenery and the like to look at. This will be just your voice. Are you game, old son?”
“One other thing,” Rafe warned. “Just because there’ll be nothing to look at, don’t overcompensate with sensations and emotions.”
“We know our jobs,” Cade felt compelled to say, and Mieka grinned at him.
Black Lightning was known for slamming an audience with everything and then some. Touchstone’s performance that night was a marvel of delicacy and control. They had come a great distance, Cade told himself with pride, from the flash and flamboyance of the “Dragon” that first Trials.
Only one thing troubled him. Just as the words—new words for this playlet, his words—described the slow rising of the sun on the hillside, he felt the sudden sting of an Elsewhen, like the fine pricking of a glass thorn. Resisting it was surprisingly easy. I haven’t time for this now! he’d thought, and concentrated on Jeska’s voice and the ebb and flow of magic, and the Elsewhen faded. But upstairs in his room that night, with Mieka quietly snoring in the bed nearby, he couldn’t bring it back. He couldn’t coax it or command it. This might have been because during the time since that muted needling, he had done or said or thought something that made it change, so that it simply disappeared.
Or it might mean that by resisting it, he’d lost it forever. Pleasant vision, urgent warning, baffling foreseeing, or even a theater piece as had happened after Tobalt’s dinner party—he had no way of knowing. Smaller than a mote of shattered glass it had been, nothing to see, just a feeling of eager expectancy. He tried to re-create the anticipation, like a call into the future, but nothing answered.
Mayhap the Elsewhens really were changing as his brain reached maturity. There was no difference in their length—anything from a quick flash to a minutes-long scene—nor in the amount of time between the here and now and the where- and whenever. He’d seen things mere instants or twenty or more years into the future. What was different was his new ability to postpone the visions, and the distinct sensation that warned him of their approach.
Must he succumb to an Elsewhen as it happened? He’d only just got the knack of postponing them. The sense of control over this thing he’d never even dreamed he could control had been exhilarating. To suspect that if he refused it at the exact moment of its occurrence was to lose it entirely—
—and what if the Elsewhens simply stopped?
“Quill.”
Soft though it was, Mieka’s voice startled him so much that he struggled to sit straight up in bed, tangling himself in the sheet. “What? What is it?”
“Go to sleep.”
Cade fell back onto the pillows. “Can’t.”
“The show was great. Nobody will ask for his money back. Or her money, either!” he added with a chuckle. “Stop anguishing yourself.”
He barely heard what Mieka said, for the turn took him violently, as if it knew not to give him even an instant to refuse it.
{Dolven Wold; its outdoor theater, the Rose Court, where they’d played for the first time last summer; the strange iron grate in the middle of the stage in the shape of a full-blown rose; the blood flowing down into it, fresh blood, thick bright red blood, spilling through the grate—}
“There’s something down there!” he cried.
“What? Where?” Mieka demanded.
“Something—I don’t know, I didn’t see—”
“Quill!” Mieka’s hands were on his shoulders, not shaking him, just supporting him. “Quill, it’s all right. You’re back. You’re safe.”
He shook his head. “Nobody’s safe.” He had no idea where that thought had come from, but he knew it was true. Or would be true. Or might be true.
“You are. We are. I promise, Quill.”
Mieka sat on the bed, squirming around so his back was against the wall. He coaxed Cade nearer and wrapped his arms around him, tugging the sheet up to cover them both. Cade rested his head on Mieka’s shoulder, his spine to the Elf’s chest.
“It’s all right. Close your eyes and sleep, Quill. You’re safe.”
No, not safe, not exactly. His own mind would never permit it. But what he did feel was… protected. Although a less likely protector than this wild, mad, clever little Elf could not be imagined—perhaps it was because even if the world and the Elsewhens turned his life curly as a corkscrew, Mieka was just that much crazier. He found both comfort and amusement in that idea, and was smiling slightly as he fell asleep.
Which sweet and mellow feeling did not interfere with a powerful desire to strangle Mieka two nights later.
Cade had glimpsed the new thorn-roll when Mieka unpacked his satchels. The wagon being across town at a blacksmith’s for repairs, they’d had to remove almost all their clothing and other gear from its tidy shelving and carry it with them to the inn. Before leaving Gallantrybanks Cade had inspected Mieka’s bags—not really caring about the thorn, because he had his own supply of blockweed and such in the wyvern-hide wallet Mieka had given him years ago. No, what he was searching for was black powder and, sure enough, five little parchment twists of it had been tucked inside a presumably secret pocket in one satchel. Mieka had protested that he wanted it for teaching Master Prickspur up north not to deny Elves room at his inn. Cade sternly quashed temptation to aid and abet, and got rid of the black powder. Mieka pouted elaborate
ly. Not elaborately enough, Cade discovered that night at Players Hall, not with his heart really in it, and for good reason.
Scorning as always the glisker’s bench, which he pushed off to one side now that he had the wooden support frames, Mieka danced and chortled his way through “Troll and Trull.” At the very end, when usually he jumped over the glass baskets to join his partners onstage for their bows, he paused, reached into a jacket pocket, struck a flint-rasp, and blew up the glisker’s bench.
“It was naught but the padding,” he said backstage. “And Cade keeps saying we ought to give over shattering glass.”
Rounding on him, Rafe growled, “You could’ve killed us all!”
“That measly little bang? ’Twasn’t much more than a damp baby-fart.”
Jeska was still picking bits of upholstery and feather stuffing off his shirt. “You put the baskets and withies in danger, too.”
“Not for an instant,” Mieka scoffed.
Keeping his arms tightly folded across his chest, Cade asked softly, “What’s in the thorn-roll? The purple one Brishen left for you at her place.”
Mieka shrugged.
“You never would have done this if you were only drunk.” He heard his voice getting louder. “So it has to be some new sort of thorn that makes you completely insane!”
When he saw in those thorn-blurred eyes that Mieka was calculating whether or not he’d get away with a lie, he made a grab for the Elf’s left wrist. He felt the gallop and stutter of the pulse beneath his fingers. Rafe closed powerful hands around slight shoulders to hold Mieka steady as Cade ripped the seam of his shirtsleeve to expose the marks. There were old ones, long since healed, and newer ones still faintly reddened, and one inside his elbow that was so recent that Cade’s roughness tore off the tiny scab. A drop of blood welled up. Rafe let him go as if to hold on an instant more would scar his hands.
“What’s it to you?” Mieka snarled. “We gave them a great show!”
“And you think that’s all that matters?”
“I think that’s all that matters to you!”
Cade pushed him back, and he stumbled against a support pillar, barely keeping his feet.
“Sleep in the wagon tonight,” Cade told him. “Don’t come anywhere near me until our next performance.”
Just then the supervisor of Players Hall pushed through the curtain to the tiring room. He was in perfect raptures about the show, not a bit concerned with the partial obliteration of his glisker’s bench. They were Touchstone, after all. Something of the sort was only to be expected. And it was better than losing the expensive glass shades on the doorway lamps, or a row of windows. Mieka threw Cade a look of pure venom behind an enchanting smile. Cade turned on his heel and walked out.
27
He went to bed early that night—before the Minster chimes struck midnight, anyway—unwilling to listen to any more of the argument going on inside his own head. One voice kept ranting about how foolish, how reckless, how malicious, how just plain stupid Mieka Windthistle could be. Another voice nattered on about how close Cade had come to what he feared most: losing his temper for good and all, and using his thin, strong Wizard’s hands to take that fucking little Elf apart, piece by bleeding, broken piece.
A third voice suggested that tonight would be a good time for the combination of blockweed and greenthorn that could calm him. Usually he avoided it, for the hangover could be annoying, but tonight he was just angry enough, and there were enough hours ahead of him to sleep it all off, that he got out the wallet Mieka had given him years ago. Scarcely had he pricked a delicate hole in his arm when he sensed the Elsewhen approaching. It was almost a relief. He didn’t even consider trying to reject it. If he did that too often, they might stop altogether.
Nearly sunrise. The scene of the finding of the Rights appeared, lit by the full moon that outlined the tumbledown wall. And then he realized that there was no snow. It wasn’t winter, or Wintering sunset. Neither was he inhabiting the tall form with what he’d thought were Elfen ears but he now knew to be Fae. He was bodiless. He didn’t really exist.
{“If the sun strikes the stones from behind at Wintering, then it must strike the stones front-on at Midsummer dawn. I figured it out when I was here at Spring Quarterday—did the measurements and everything. Simple!”
“Clever, clever you,” Alaen snapped. “I don’t see any evidence of it yet.”
“Sun’s not up,” Briuly pointed out.
Alaen turned to the east and a sudden shaft of light struck him right in the face. The next moment he was on the ground, shoved aside by his cousin, who was laughing with delighted vindication.
The shine of gold and silver threaded through spun glass: a chain of a hundred perfect links and a crown that was a circle of sunbursts and crescent moons and diamond-studded stars. The Rights rested on a flat rock that formed the seat of the throne, its back the stone wall. Whole, immaculate, glowing like rough-carved chunks of moonlight sparkling in the new morning sunshine at his back.
To take up the carkanet and crown, to sit upon the throne, to cause the suns and moons and stars to ignite and proclaim a True King—how dazzling bright it would be, no paltry yellowish Elf-light nor sickly blue Wizardfire nor red-gold glower of a Caitiff’s spellcasting, but the pure silver and gold radiance of the Rights.
Briuly seized the crown with his long, thin hands and put it on his head, still laughing, his thorn-sharp eyes wild with joy. “The Fae King!”
Yet there was naught but sunglow on the crown. No inner fire, no eldritch shimmer. Briuly’s eyes lost their exultant sheen and his smile wavered and died. “I don’t—I don’t understand—”
“Idiot. What did you think would happen? And look, you’ve dropped the necklace.” For in his taking, the carkanet had been dislodged, dangling on a jag of stone just above the mud of last night’s rain. Alaen bent, reaching for it, saying, “For Chirene—I couldn’t bear to see any other woman wear it.”
Yet before his fingers touched it, there came the yowling of the hounds.
Alaen scrambled to his feet and ran like all Hells were after him—which a goodly number of them were. They rode out of the Westerlands, Sentinels charged with the safekeeping of the Rights until the crown encircled the brow of a True King and the carkanet clasped the throat of a True Queen. These were not the Fae of mortals’ pretty imaginings, portrayed in stone and glass and paint as winged, exquisite, elegant. These were the other sort of Fae. Fanged, hideous, filthy, huge, riding gigantic black horses with clawed feet, horses that screamed enraged reply to the belling royal hounds.
The dogs were skeletal and hideously swift, with bony bodies and narrow muzzles and a ridge of tufting fur along their spines. They formed a boundary of bared teeth and shrill growls round Nackerty Close, the field with many corners. The Sentinels drew rein, most of them at the broken wall. Two of them on their gruesome mounts continued on, halting when they loomed over Alaen where he had stumbled to the ground. They paused, glancing coldly at his twisted limbs and bloodied forehead.
“Carkanet?” one of the Fae yelled over a massive shoulder, and the rocks littering the ground quivered. The second Fae raised his sword.
“Untouched!” the cry came back.
“Unsullied, then.” A nod, reluctant; the sword dipping back down, deprived of a kill. “Leave him. We’ll take the other.”}
Cade opened his eyes to the darkness of his bedchamber, gasping, covered in clammy sweat. I did this, he thought helplessly. I did this. My fault. I told them to search. I told them where to look. But not on Midsummer dawn!
“Cayden?”
An opening door, a bit of Elf-light—no fear in it, a willing conjuring. He saw her only in outline, the slight and slender shape, the pale hair glowing.
Why couldn’t it have been Mieka coming through the door? Mieka would have understood. Would not be staring at him like this, shocked and frightened. Mieka—
{Cade gripped the tregetour’s lectern in both hands, watching in hor
ror as Mieka’s dance became a flailing stagger. The magic surged, faltered, swept the audience with a ferocity that took all Rafe’s skill and strength to control. The images and sensations of Bewilderland were even more bizarre than usual, and that was what people came for, returning again and again to be assaulted by Cayden Silversun’s nightmares. But whatever he had put into the withies, Mieka was enhancing with drunken, thorn-roused horrors of his own. People began to scream.
Cade lunged for the glisker’s bench, shoved Mieka out of the way, grabbed the withies. The Elf didn’t even protest, so completely thornlost that he merely sat down on the floor and began counting his fingers like a toddling child.
They finished the performance, Lord and Lady alone knew how. The only thing Cade could think of was how much he would enjoy kicking the living shit out of Mieka Windthistle. Two thousand people were out there, gasping, shaking, trying to recover from an onslaught more brutal and undisciplined than anything Black Lightning had ever dared to do.
He turned, fists clenched. Those eyes were looking up at him, but they were no longer Mieka’s eyes. Parts of him were gone, lost to whiskey and thorn and despair. The memories stored in muscle and bone took him through the work, but none of it was guided by his conscious mind. Where before, instinct and intellect had combined with physical grace to produce an unmatched brilliance, now the muscles remembered the basics of the movements, but didn’t really know what to do without that inspired mind’s direction.
Cade felt no compassion. He would never forgive Mieka for this, never.
“Quill—”
Those big, pathetic eyes; that once-beautiful face; this drunken, thorn-thralled stranger who used to be Mieka Windthistle—
“Get out!” he roared, and kicked over the wooden frames, and all the glass baskets made by Blye so long ago shattered onto the stage.}
“Cade? What’s wrong?” The little yellow-gold Elf-light trembled. “You look like you’ve seen—”